Ben Affleck ranks as the No. 1 entertainer of the year in
Entertainment Weekly. The main impetus for the honor: his direction of and starring role
in the film
Argo.

“Fifteen years after he bounded onto the Hollywood scene in 1997’s
Good Will Hunting, the 40-year-old Affleck is now older and wiser — and may very well be
headed back to the Oscar stage for his political thriller about the real-life covert CIA mission
that freed six diplomats from Tehran during the Iran hostage crisis,” the magazine says.

Affleck — who with his wife, actress
Jennifer Garner, has three children — observes: “When you’re younger and have the
early success that I had — it sounds like the worst Hallmark cliche — but I didn’t have anyone to
share it with. . . . I want to make the kinds of movies that my kids are proud of. I have higher
standards, in a way, for them.”

The shaggy hair and beard he grew for the movie weren’t hits at home.

“My wife is a very polite and kind woman,” he says. “She and the kids did not like the beard; it
had an exposed-wire vibe.”